The mid-90s were the "overproduction" era for baseball cards, with card companies releasing several sets each season. Today's blog post contains five cards from four sets released by the same company in 1997. Some have shiny foil on them and don't scan particularly well.
Card Number 432: DonRuss, 1997; #3
This isn't a bad scan - it's just a very dark card design!
Tony's calling out to claim a high flyball on the back. There's also a huge stats box.
Card Number 433: DonRuss, 1997; #407
This was another card for Tony in the base set, as part of a subset called the Hit List.
There are 25 players on the Hit List on the back, and they all had a card in the subset. However, DonRuss didn't release the cards in the same numerical order as the list. There were 8 cards in the set before Tony's Hit List card even though he was batting champion in 1996 - as shown on the list!
I'm going to do the next four cards in alphabetical order of their set names...
A premium card range with foilboard card fronts that are horrible to scan!
The back looks better. The way the stats are laid out is quite fetching.
As it's name suggests, this small 100-card set was mainly a vehicle for carrying autographed cards.
The photo on the front has Tony swinging, with a great view of the Swinging Friar sleeve patch!
On the back we have a picture of Tony's follow through, taken from the other side of the plate.
There's an unusual design choice on the back, using his name as a watermark and printing the headers for the (incomplete) stats box over it.
Card Number 436: DonRuss VXP 1.0, 1997; #20
This was another card set where the cards were basically pack filler around CD-Roms. They predate the Upper Deck PowerDeck cards that I mentioned yesterday by two years! VXP stood for Visual eXPerience, as in watching the content of a CD-Rom. Unlike PowerDeck, which was an entire set of CD-Roms, there were only six CD-Rom inserts in VXP. Tony didn't feature on a CD-Rom, so I won't be keeping an eye out for them.
It's a nice card though.
The back manages to combine full bleed and a frame in the design. The stats box only goes back 5 years.
This isn't an exhaustive list of the DonRuss cards Tony appeared on in 1997. It's a nice mix of designs and scanning challenges!
Total: 436 cards
Out of these designs, I like the Donruss Signature the most... because it's simple.
ReplyDeleteI've always found the Elite and Signature cards to be annoyingly hard to read.
ReplyDeleteI guess the strength of releasing so many different sets is there's something that will appeal to everyone.
ReplyDelete